A few recent articles have been claiming that Kindles, in particular the Kindle DX, will spark rampant book piracy.
- TechCrunch thinks Kindle DX will be a success because PDF support encourages rampant book piracy.
- Guardian goes as far as to say (in an extremely convoluted way) that piracy will help ebook sales.
Here are a few random thoughts -
EReaders like the Kindle do allow for book piracy
One major factor preventing large scale book piracy was that it was hard to read books on existing screens – computer screens, phone screens, etc. were very inferior compared to paper. EInk isn’t. That means that finally pirated ebooks have a device that lets them compete with printed books.
Before we jump into what’s right or wrong let’s explore whether the effort of acquiring pirated books is worth the price savings.
Ease of 60 second kindle downloads Vs the lure of free ebooks
The effort of acquiring free ebooks is a combination of -
- Figuring out where to get free ebooks.
- Software (like Torrent software) if needed.
- Finding a good copy of the ebook and downloading it.
- Avoiding the risk of a virus.
- Converting if needed.
- Transferring from your pc to the Kindle or the DX.
This is hardly trivial. Piracy makes sense for $200 software – However, for a $10 book this is too much effort for a lot of people. For a $50 textbook its somewhat of a possiblity.
The obvious workaround would be for someone to either -
- Break Mobipocket DRM; or
- Have an on-Kindle program that downloads pirated books straight to the Kindle.
Amazon can control what sites can be accessed via the Kindle and that rules out Option #2. Breaking Mobipocket’s DRM hasn’t been done yet – it does exist as a viable option.
At this point, the effort to get a $9.99 book for free is not worth the effort. There are however things that encourage piracy, and counter-intuitively, a lot of them are efforts to prevent piracy.
Barriers that increase Piracy
We’ll leave out people that use pirated ebooks without any moral qualms. Lets focus on the portion of readers that are undecided and the factors that would cause them to use pirated ebooks (without worrying too much about relative importance) -
- Barriers that make acquiring and using normal ebooks difficult. BookSquare get it right – Unreasonable barriers cause piracy. Turning off Text To Speech is a good example. Pricing books higher than $9.99 is another.
- Treating Customers like Thieves - When customers feel they are being mistreated then they react by choosing piracy.
- Lack of policing. Content creators have to police the Internet for pirated content. A great example of publishers not doing a good job of policing is the rise of document sharing websites like Scribd. By now offering their books on Scribd they have made a strategic mistake.
Its a tough balance – putting in enough checks and restrictions to prevent piracy while not overdoing it to the point that well intentioned customers start choosing to read pirated ebooks.
The Kindle is great because its a closed system and also because it has set a precedent for people to pay for content.
Closing Thoughts
Piracy is somewhat of an issue for books. It becomes a big issue for textbooks as the price makes the amount of effort worthwhile. Publishers have the rather challenging problem that they are stepping into a domain they don’t understand very well and that has a completely different ethos.
Piracy is definitely going to help ereader sales, especially the DX with its PDF support and larger screen. And there is no magic solution - Amazon and publishers will have to figure out a way to avoid mass proliferation of free textbooks. And do this while making sure they don’t overdo restrictions and incent customers to choose pirated ebooks.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | kindle digital piracy, pirated ebooks
You missed the biggest reason, lack of availability. If you can’t get it any other way than piracy you don’t have a legal means of obtaining it. (Harry Potter, etc)
good catch.
The price issue may not be as simple as it seems at first glance. I’ve already paid for physical books in the past that I wish I could now have in Kindle versions instead. What seems at first like a $9.99 barrier might actually be double or triple that amount, psychologically, because of what I’ve already paid in the past for the same content.
“Too much trouble”? I really don’t think that the price is driving the piracy issue. Maybe it is with an older generation, who feels that the piracy of licensed materials has some sort of steep learning curve, but not with anyone born in the last 35-40 years. The computer-savvy crowd congratulates itself on its cleverness, and knows that if the materials aren’t readily available to them, they are only a couple of clicks away from finding out how to get them.
It’s dangerous to assume that piracy of digital books isn’t going to bring down the business of literature. Look at what a free Internet is doing to the news industry.
First…unless you’re in a coffee shop or other outlet that offers free Inteernet access, the Internet is not free and if you want high speed (not dial-up or DSL) access like cable or FIOS it costs a pretty penny.
Secondly…the Internet is not what is killing the news industry; they are doing that to themselves by delivering filtered, biased garbage to the masses. The fourth column no longer exists. If it did, they wouldn’t be carrying water for Obama…they’d be reporting his and his corrupt administartions crimes instead of covering them up or excusing them.
The steps for ebook piracy do make it sound slightly more difficult, but most of them are things you only have to do once and then you get hundreds or thousands of books in a single torrent file. For piracy of a single book, your best bet is to just do a google search for “book name pdf” and you are usually all set. Also, don’t use a kindle, use a nook instead.
Quite true, but most people that work (and by so have the money to buy books) don’t have the time to read several thousand books in a reasonable time.
And secondly, weird restrictions on formats, maximum times being able to download a book you’ve bought (I don’t say own, because amazon can decide to remove books from your device if something happens), able to restrict TTS are things that make ppl do pirace.
I personally have bought books only to find out about for example the TTS restriction which prevents me from listening to the book at work, and so has forced me to actually try and find the ‘pirated’ version of something I’ve just bought, solely for the reason of being able to use/read it as I wanted to.
There seems also to be no set policy nor rules posted where you can read what amazon can and can’t do, which in turn makes ppl actually chose pirace because it’s overall more stable, even if you might not be able to access your ‘bought’ book everywhere in the world, you have enough control over it that it won’t suddenly disappear and suddenly become unavailable for download, or unavailable to add to your future e-book reader (which might not necessary be another kindle)